Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State

This work grew out of a research project on the reconstruction of the various drafts to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Four of us (Roth/Kleiber/Hanlon/Eldred) have arrived at a form-analytic reconstruction of Marx’s Capital reproduced here in the Appendix, which forms the indispensable conceptual basis for the present work. Part 1 summarises PROVISIONALLY some of the principal categories of the capital-analysis (it cannot replace the development provided in the Appendix) by way of providing a transition to an analysis of the “surface of capitalist economy” (Parts II & III). The principal form-analytic categories of the competition-analysis are those of PROPERTY, PERSON and SUBJECT OF COMPETITION. These are developed through a consideration of the subjective activity of individuals in relation to the pre-given (value-)form-determinate capitalist economic objectivity. The subject of competition is the bearer of COMPETITIV FREEDOM, the overarching concept of the competition-analysis, whose contradictoriness is to be laid bare. Part IV investigates the universal social subject which necessarily complements the competitive economy. The state too is conceptualised in relation to the form-determinate contradictory freedom of the bourgeois epoch, as REALISATION of freedom. The principal figure of the total analysis, from the beginning of the capital-analysis, is a DIALECTICAL one: the DIREMPTION of the (ABSTRACT) UNIVERSAL from the PARTICULAR. This diremption is first constituted in the double-character of bourgeois labour, conceptualised in the value-form analysis. The figure recurs again and again as the INNER BAND which, IN REALITY and FOR THINKING CONSCIOUSNESS, connects the bourgeois form of society into a contradictory TOTALITY. The claim of the present work, that our present form of society constitutes a totality, can only be validated by thinking in a SYSTEM. On the various levels of the analysis, right up to its crescendo in the investigation of DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS, the contents of EVERYDAY CONSCIOUSNESS are taken into account in order to demonstrate to it that the various aspects of contemporary life are only lived out as modes of expression of the underlying essential contradiction.